Two quick questions from a new keeper

[jester7891]

As previously suggested by some of the thought leaders of this chat room, I began to feed my one remaining hive. Two quick questions.  If bees have obviously done well for millions of years without humans feeding them in the mid-summer (before the second flow), why am I feeding them?  Is it just to try and pack food away to maximize the chance of survival throughout the winter?  I earlier removed the queen excluder from between the deep super and shallow super.  The queen excluder is loaded with propolis.  Does anybody have any solutions (that is not harmful to bees or the environment) to get the sticky propolis off?

                             Thanks,   Jester

[deejaycee]

To remove the propolis, put the whole thing in the freezer for a day or so and the propolis can then be cracked or scraped off quite easily.

As to the feeding question, "If bees have obviously done well for millions of years without humans feeding them in the mid-summer (before the second flow), why am I feeding them?"

They have done well, or at least well enough.... but they also didn't have humans taking the honey they have gathered away from them on a regular basis - honey keeps for years, and an unharvested hive can have reserves stored up months or years before they'll ever need to eat it.  WE take those reserves away, so we need to replace them.

[Bill W.]

Bees have also been dying for millions of years when times get tough.

You can practice survival of the fittest with your bees, but honey yields may leave something to be desired.

[randydrivesabus]

most of those millions of years they weren't enclosed in wooden boxes with people trying to keep them from swarming, breeding them to fulfill human needs and desires, stealing their honey, introducing foreign parasites, spraying their forage with pesticides, etc.

[Card]

If bees have obviously done well for millions of years without humans feeding them in the mid-summer (before the second flow), why am I feeding them?

I'm a new beekeeper as well, so you should probably take my opinion with a grain of salt, but the more reading I do, and the more old beekeepers I hang out with, the more I'm convinced that breeding has a lot to do with that. Or, as one oldtimer I know told me "These ain't your Grandfather's bees."

There's a pretty clear analogy for this right in front of us, after all. You know how purebreed dogs have so many more health problems than mutts tend to have? And that tendency, especially with certain breeds, just seems to keep getting worse. Part of the problem there is (of course) inbreeding, but it's also a fact that when you breed for certain traits, sometimes other things that might be important can get left out of the mix.

So for a long, long time humans have been (intentionally or otherwise) breeding bees to maximize honey production, minimize aggression, and ease management. As that process has continued over the years, other factors in the bees' genetic make-up have been marginalized or left out of the equation all together. Genetics and evolution isn't an exact science, after all. Increasing one factor in your genes can have all sorts of unintended consequences.

And I'm really starting to think that has a lot to do with it. We don't get stung much, and under the right circumstances we can harvest a lot of honey, but in return we've got some pretty fragile critters on our hands.